I will happily remain silent, lips sutured, sealing ancient,
festered wounds (though hapless impulses tug at stitches),
my tongue a giddy atrophy, old car in its garage. I’ll not
wag or lash it anytime soon.
I know this silence, a wide horizon, an ocean, a silence
nearly as deep as magma sputtering beneath
the Laurentian Abyss. Awed by sublime, I only teeter
at its precipice, a wanderer in a Romantic’s painting.
I search my shelves for adequate locutions, attic, cellar,
spare room, to fit rather than buy a new articulation.
But my attempts remain clumsy, lumbering obstacles
so long as obsession hinders my intent (My mind
a fence row, nettles, burs and briar strangled in barbed wire.
There. There now.)
Does silence abide the absurd or pass unencumbered,
whistling through my ribs, wind through an abandoned
house? As the Buddha, a monk, I shall loosen my grip
on petty clamor, what’s futile, samatha, tranquility,
my singular desire.
This silence is (and I shall listen without interruption)
a breeze whispering through pines just outside
my window; the lulling murmur of phoebes hopping
and pecking across the yard;
the trillium pushing noisily though mayapples and loam;
with the morning sun, apple blossoms opening one by one.
I shall regard each arrival, each pink bud,
each white explosion.
This silence is (Though much too sentimental, I’ll try again.)
that warm afternoon, lolling in bed, when there’s nothing else,
when I apprehend, galvanic skin to skin, lip to breast,
I love my lover, when words are ludicrous.
David Sapp, writer and artist, lives along the southern shore of Lake Erie in North America. A Pushcart nominee, he was awarded Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Grants for poetry and the visual arts. His poetry and prose appear widely in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. His publications include articles in the Journal of Creative Behavior, chapbooks Close to Home and Two Buddha, a novel Flying Over Erie, and a book of poems and drawingstitled Drawing Nirvana.
